Bernard Lagan: Bulletin from Sydney - Pauline Hanson’s One Nation rides high once more
Hot right now: One Nation’s Pauline Hanson commands new heights in opinion polls. Photo / Getty Images
It takes less than 30 minutes to drive from Sydney’s CBD west to Lakemba – a suburb that heaves with joyous diversity. It hosts the nation’s largest mosque, set within a sea of dwellings where only a third of the residents were born in Australia, and Arabic is spoken more often than English.
Its wildly successful Ramadan night markets – set to draw a million visitors this year from mid-February to mid-March – serve up a vast array of fare each night from 6pm until 2am; there’s samosa chat, dahi puri, mango lassi, chicken gozleme, satay, noodles, roti curry, knafeh, and many others.
The markets are testament to the nation’s transformation since the last vestiges of the infamous White Australia policy were torn down in the early 1970s and replaced with multicultural policies that recognised the rights of migrants within mainstream Australia to express their cultural identity.
But not all agree – and some stridently disagree, such as Pauline Hanson, leader of Australia’s resurgent right-wing One Nation party, now commanding new highs in opinion polls. In late January, One Nation overtook the combined vote of Australia’s centre-right opposition coalition for the first time. With more than 20% support, One Nation’s popularity is threatening even the incumbent Labor government and, if current trends continue, might yet eclipse it.
Perhaps emboldened by her party’s soaring fortunes, built largely on its virulent anti-immigration policies, Hanson managed to stun even some of those at the top of her party when she declared last month that there are no “good Muslims”, while singling out Lakemba as somewhere people – those like her, presumably – “feel unwanted”. She later partially walked back her comments, saying she did not genuinely believe there were no good Muslims because One Nation once had a non-practising Muslim woman stand as a candidate.
Certainly, the mid-December massacre by Islamic terrorists of 15 people attending a Jewish celebration at Sydney’s Bondi beach fuelled the newly febrile debate around migration. But the panic within the centre-right parties – the Liberals and Nationals – over the leaching of their supporters to One Nation is causing their leaders to begin mimicking Hanson – or, at least, her policies.
The Liberal Party, long Australia’s dominant conservative party, dumped its first female leader last month after she served only nine months, installing former Rhodes scholar and McKinsey consulting partner Angus Taylor, who brokered the deal among New Zealand farmers that launched Fonterra. Upon taking over the Liberal Party, Taylor declared Australia’s migration numbers were too high and the entry standards for migrants too low.
Taylor is certainly not alone in talking tough on immigration, given that anti-immigration sentiment is fuelling much of the accelerating appeal of right-wing parties in Europe and, arguably, Winston Peters’ New Zealand First.
Less predictable have been the shifts within the Labor Party that reveal an ebbing tolerance for dissent and a harder-nosed attitude to those Australians it deems no longer welcome.
When Sydney police in February violently disrupted a group of Muslims attempting to pray during a protest against visiting Israeli President Isaac Herzog, New South Wales’ Labor premier Chris Minns pointedly refused to apologise – even though his own police commissioner belatedly did.